Tourists

By Lynn Emanuel b. 1949 Lynn Emanuel

In Tunis we try to discuss divorce

And dying but give up to lounge

With rug merchants under a plum tree.

From its corner the lamb’s severed head

Watches the flies drink from its eyes

And its fat disappear into the fire.

The light rinses the edge of your sandal,

The two wasps that ornament the blur

Of screened window. My grandmother

Would have loved a night like this.

In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart

With its china rolling through Cook Street’s

Stony yard one summer when I was always

Thirsty, and she moved like a figure

On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart,

Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut

My hair with the straight razor.

I was a week out of the hospital.

Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed

With stitches of surgical thread.

The scalpel came so close it gave

My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died.

Years later I can still see the skin

Flutter on the inside of my left breast

And my heart limps like a great uncle

Who, because he was a Jew and lame,

Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes.

He became a friend asking a favor

Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly

Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.

Source: Hotel Fiesta (University of Illinois Press, 1984)

Biography

Lynn Emanuel is the author of several volumes of poetry. She sees her Hotel Fiesta (1984), The Dig (1992), and Then, Suddenly— (1999) as a triptych exploring the convention and flexibility of the book, and the agency of readers and writers. As poet Eavan Boland notes, “Lynn Emanuel’s poems have a rare power: they connect to the world through estrangement.”

The Dig received the National Poetry Series Award. Emanuel’s work has . . .

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